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They will absolutely put something in to prevent you from doing that, too much of their profit relies on the experience you hate.

Yeah, whatever happened to the personal computer, a kind of capital equipment available to the masses, something you own and can direct towards your goals and wellbeing?

Instead it's like we're sharecropping on a device companies have established as a colonial outpost to monitor us for profitable compliance.

> Pets can't speak [...] Current AI's can. It's a very bad example.

You've misunderstood the comparison analogy. It's showing two situations where implicit timeframes are important when people talk about what is "true", where the second one makes the importance extra-obvious.

"Pets doing taxes" could just as easily be swapped with "cold fusion generator in your garage" or "rocket-ship for personal commutes."

If you're trying to figure out how LLM weights are like the weights of a rocket payload, then you're going in the wrong direction.

Nah, it "betrays" an awareness of something implicitly obvious: All the software/machines we might discuss are ones from ~2026, rather than ones from ~2226.

Similarly, "pets can't do my taxes" is a reasonable statement, because it is implicit that it doesn't include hundreds of years of genetic engineering and cyborg implants.

Whenever a human writes/improvises a fictional character, it is typically to communicate some concept or goal to other people. The fictional character--even a simplified author-insert speaking "directly"--is part of how the medium works.

So in a way your question is equivalent to: "Why do humans have intents and minds but LLMs don't?"

"You're trying to parse HTML with a linear regex. That algorithmic approach is too limited to do what we want with the problem-space."

"Why can't you just admit that you think only tree-parsers have souls!?"

> The first was a traditional interview problem where we give the candidate a codebase and a docker image to run against

Is that also on a company provided computer?

There are a lot more scams these days where a job-seeker compromises their computer by running provided code, and often docker isn't much against malice.

I feel like this is a bit too-optimistically describing an outcome which is unlikely, given how consumers have been slowly losing the same war for decades already.

The elephant in the room and the really "tricky part" involves powerful advertising and copyright-holding companies. They will (continue to) interpret that kind of user-agency as an existential threat. Their businesses revolve around deciding and knowing what you actually see and do with your computer, and their toolkit isn't just technical, but also economic and political.

That's why we already have problems with DRM, "felony contempt of business model" under the DMCA, browser fingerprinting, and everybody surrendering to arbitrary JS code controlling their computer. We capitulate not just to see an article or talk to a friend, but also to avoid our technical details getting into a secret un-appeal-able "suspicious" blacklist.

I think this video is more about planned-obsolescence, rather than enshittification.

Enshittification involves things like leverage and bargaining power. The company gets big by offering a great thing to consumers or producers (sometimes alternately) and then when it gets a comfortable middleman monopoly it begins profiting by oppressing both sides.

I'm probably not the only one now remembering Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (1971) and/or the 1982 animated movie.

My initial reaction is that this is less worrying than a transgenic approach.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Frisby_and_the_Rats_of_NI...

> monetize it at the expense of

Right, and I'd also like to preempt any apologetics trying to cloak it as socially-beneficial "information discovery."

Many of these betting/insider-trading scenarios are structured so that the information only becomes revealed at the same moment it becomes worthless. (In some cases, that's just a return to its default state.) Like the value of knowing the winning numbers from an expired lotto draw.

For me, the use-case of commit messages is to help a human discover when some kind of thing might have changed, as distinct from the commits before and after it. Importantly, the human is doing a subjective scan for something that sounds relevant.

If they already knew what function or detail is involved, they would be already be doing a "all commits that touched this line" filter, and my comment about affecting $thing would probably be superfluous.

I also don't need to tell them such details in the commit, because that is better expressed by the actual diff.

So in a sense, I'm trying to provide good keywords, about transactions, errors, logging, button color, whatever.

Just trying some napkin math...

Some very surface-level searching shows someone claiming a total societal cost of ~$7k per deer collision.

Supposing it's a $15m construction and could last 30 years without major maintenance, then it needs to stop ~71 events per year to "pay for itself".

To be fair, that is the cost of collisions rather than any near-misses and traffic problems, or the less-quantified ecological cost.

> SNAP is funded.

Disregarding the weird roadkill thing: "Funded" isn't necessarily a meaningful determination, since Congress providing 100% funding for $5 that zero people are eligible to receive would also be "fully funded."

In 2025 Republicans slashed its budget by the biggest cut in history, and today participation is the lowest in 17 years.

I doubt any of us honestly believe the drop is because everybody's financial situation has gotten way better right now, or because groceries got cheaper.

https://www.cbpp.org/research/food-assistance/snap-tracker-p...

> don't even include proofs in their mental concept of what math involves

Technically, the largest majority are the people who go: "What are proofs?" :P

How does that matter? Parent-poster asked about sincerity of thought, not originality.

If the spouses-to-be at a marriage ceremony say "I do", would you leap up from the audience to denounce them as frauds because obviously they heard the vow-formula before a hundred times? Hopefully not, and not only for reasons of decorum.

In contrast, most of the LLM slop I deal with from coworkers involve statements that--while less formulaic--are ones they can't even recall saying and are unwilling to defend when questioned.

Sometimes minimal information is better than extrapolated information, especially when the extrapolation mentally painful to read and has decent probability of being wrong with inaccuracies that waste people's time.

Also:

1. It's often a premature extrapolation from diffs and tickets which you could probably generate later, at need, and likely with even better results.

2. If those commit messages can ever influence future work, then it's just carcinogenic cargo-cult cruft. Pruning outputs (future inputs) is important to prevent weird unwanted drift.

P.S.: Migrating decades of local messages was a huge problem. It's been so long that many import/export tools are defunct. I was even loading up extremely old versions of Thunderbird to see if I could import to that and then upgrade.

However the GitHub edition (not Sourceforge) of Eudora2Unix [0] saved me and deserves a shout-out here.

It took some tweaks and a harness to repeatedly try the conversion, since I wanted something I could literally drop into the Thunderbird profile folder. The final result wasn't perfect, (some file attachment issues linger) but it's way better than having it all at risk of Eudora.exe just refusing to launch one day.

[0] https://github.com/jonabbey/eudora2unix

But surely the reasons for that change are not "the invention of a free army of unpaid minterns."

Ex: Much-more furniture being sold are duplicates from a factory process; There are better tools—which do not substitute for executive function.

It makes sense to me, if you consider that a "damaged rope" is a bit more elastic, so it stretches more, and allows the anvil to come to rest at a marginally lower position above your head. But only marginally.

In other words, it'd probably a terrible tradeoff to reduce the impact of some disaster by 0.0001% at the expense of making it 0.1% more likely/frequent to occur.

Yeah, many do not even allow you to enter in a custom question, which would be marginally better--at least for users who care about security.

Then you'd have the option to craft a question which is (A) personally memorable (B) specifically phrased to avoid ambiguity, (C) not public or guessable, and (D) unique to a service.

* "Where is your first pet buried?"

* "While on vacation, The Noodle Incident happened in which city?"

* In what year did you first see Example Band live in concert along with Alice and Bob?"

No, it's usually an instinctive power-saving mechanism, and it happens incredibly frequently.

For example, the average driving commuter is not "zoning out" because of some bad experience with roads or cars, but because the route is extremely familiar.

Like so: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/blame

While we're at it, the insanity of those "recovery questions", made even worse when many companies demand the same ones.

A while ago I helped an elderly relative migrate off off a copy of Eudora that they'd been using for many years. (To Thunderbird.)

Originally it was about difficulty migrating to a new laptop with a different version of Windows, but I was quite firm about it because when I realized it wasn't able to do secure connections for some reason, so the instant they took their laptop to public Wi-Fi...

Sometimes "reporting" / "monitoring" is how someone does an end-run around normal product and engineering, and we skip adding what ought to be a feature or domain concept.

For example, suppose someone wants special logging whenever a certain field is edited... And then you find out their real goal is to be able to copy-paste old values back in when someone calls up support and says "oops something went wrong." Now the reporting tool is an intermittent part of our customer support.

In contrast, imagine if there was a real "settings events" table that recorded changes in the app and users could go see them. Or a new concept of "revisions", instead of single mutable field.

I figured that with the crafting, piping in fresh water, and magic incantations, Enki would be the most data-center-adjacent of the deities. :P

I think this boils down to how it can be tough to tell the difference between:

1. I speak about it as if it were a person because I have embedded some beliefs and expectations which are wrong.

2. I speak about it as if it were a person just because that's just how the English language works when describing complicated things.

Similarly, the faceless mannequin in the clothing store "poses" as a person, and even "beckons" customers with an outstretched arm, yet nobody on the sidewalk is confused or falls in love [0] with the mannequin.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mannequin_(1987_film)

> Stop treating [them as] unconstrained, above-the-law actors.

With apologies to Baudelaire: The greatest trick exploitative powers ever played was convincing the people that it was impossible to imagine anything else.

Sometimes blinkering people so that they never ask the question "why is this being done to me" or "why is justice not possible" is much easier than finding an answer that will get them to go away.

I think you just accidentally described what's already been happening for 7000+ years.

Though if any followers still exist, they probably wouldn't agree that 𒀭𒂗𒆠 was just a fad.